Grippando is not only a New York Times-bestselling novelist but virtually the past decade has served as counsel for the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, LLP. In January 2009, the company went after Ponzi monster Bernie Madoff to file one of the first class-action suits on behalf of the people victimized by him. Over the course of participating in this case, he had a front-row view of of how Madoff siphoned off the billions of dollars, where the money went, and the inefficacy of the SEC.

Thus he had the framework for his current novel, Need You Now. The author's plots are many times taken from real-life situations, and his new one begs several questions: How could the SEC have messed up so terribly?
Were they part of the cover-up? Where did all of Madoff's money go? What if Madoff was only part of an even larger financial situation and his downfall was simply considered collateral damage?

In Need You Now, Abe Cushman has scored $60 billion in a Ponzi scheme and then killed himself. Patrick Lloyd, a Wall Street advisor at a leading financial bank, gets sucked into the mess because his girlfriend is directly tied into the situation. What unfolds over the next 350-plus pages involves the FBI, the SEC, secret meetings, and the shady things that happen when really big money is involved.